Update: The season was announced a bit early at 8:15 PM. Check the "League" menu at the top of this page or go here: www.dpchallenge.com/league/. If you don't currently see the menu, try refreshing your browser, or clearly your cache.

The new season of the DPL will be announced at midnight (or perhaps as early as this evening) and signups will begin forthwith. The first season will be run as a beta. Features will be added, removed, and changed throughout the season as we better integrate it into DPChallenge. If you have any ideas or suggestions for improvement, please feel free to share them.

Regarding DPC outages, please excuse my silence during them last week. The reason, which I suspect everyone knows at this point, was that we suffered the loss of an upstream provider's router around 1:30 AM EDT. Since StrikeSlip was not on hand to suggest that we swap it with a known good one, we sat on our hands for good number of hours. Really though, given the time of day that this happened, it proved difficult to negotiate the rerouting of our systems. By 8:45 AM EDT, we had secured an alternate route and were available to about 70% of the internet, and by 12:30 PM EDT we were back at full capacity.

The unfortunate news is that to avoid a situation like this in the future, we'll need to undergo a little bit of maintenance in the coming weeks. The IP addresses for DPChallenge and DPCPrints' we'll likely be changed and some redundancy tests will be executed at scheduled times. I'll post these times when they are made available to me. I apologize in advanced for any trouble you have reaching the site in the near future. It should be brief if anything.

I'll be glad to post my schedule so you can plan your outages around the times I won't be needing DPC. As a suggestion, I would think that around Sunday night at midnight server time would be a great time. Nothing is going on then anyway.

Good questions indeed, I'll let the first paragraph of the DPL's about page attempt to answer that:

"The DPChallenge Photography League or "DPL" for short, is a way for photographers to join together as a team and compete against other teams using their collective vote averages. It allows for something normally very independent (DPChallenge) to become a team effort and creates comradery among fellow DPChallenge users. It is a fantastic way to break out of your comfort zone and meet new people on the site and in turn create friendships. It also stimulates the learning factor that the entire site is all about.

With the DPL you now have a group of people that want to see you shoot the very best you can for the team. They will help you learn new things and improve on techniques you already use. So in the end you still have to shoot your own photos and make them look the best you can while using all the valuable information provided by your teammates. This brings us out of being in these challenges just for ourselves and adds more of a duty to shoot better every time. The DPL will also give you reason to shoot for the weekly challenges so you aren't letting your teammates down by not entering. The DPL is the perfect addition to DPChallenge and will do nothing but add more substance to the site and your photography."

I'm looking forward to it! It will be 6:00 am for me. On normal days I'm still sleeeping, but tomorrow I'm fully awake, but not at home and without an internet connection. Later on the day will be fine, I'll think.